Thesis advisor: Patrick H. Byrne / My first aim in this dissertation is to elucidate Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus through the writings of Bernard Lonergan, SJ. My second aim is to elucidate Lonergan’s thought by adducing it, in action, in Oedipus Tyrannus. Instead of analyzing what a classical text means to its own time and place, I undertake a philosophy of classics, exploring various philosophical problems by using Sophoclean texts. The paper incidentally discloses an interpretation of Oedipus Tyrannus that is at odds with some of the leading authors in the secondary literature while remaining consonant with others. I use Woodruff and Meineck’s 2003 translation of Theban Plays throughout because I find the translation refreshing. It is my hope that this paper, like all good papers, raises more questions than answers. In Chapter 1, I recruit Lonergan’s three basic observations about human knowing to explain Oedipus’ cognitive journey over the course of the play. First, Lonergan notes that underpinning all human knowing is the spirit of inquiry; the pure, unrestricted desire to know, which Lonergan calls “the supreme heuristic notion.” Second, he observes that the structure of human knowing is invariant. No matter who you are – mathematician, scientist, commonsense knower, etc. – all human knowing follows a dynamic but invariant structure Lonergan calls the “self-correcting cycle of learning.” This cycle moves from inquiry to insight to judgment to decision. Third, this invariant, self-correcting cycle, underpinned by the pure unrestricted desire to know, operates within dynamically shifting patterns of consciousness, modes of human knowing, that are circumscribed by our concerns, expressed by the kinds of questions we ask. Human consciousness is “polymorphic.” Using these three points as touchstones, I elucidate the dynamism of Oedipus’ cognitional structure by tracing the self-correcting sequence of his 132 questions until he arrives at his famous insight, which is simultaneously a virtually unconditioned judgment, expressed by his cry: Oh! Oh! It all comes clear! Light, let me look at you one last time. I am exposed – born to forbidden parents, joined In forbidden marriage, I brought forbidden death (Lines 1181-1185). With the concrete situation known and understood with clarity (σαφής), Oedipus’ consciousness should now become sublated into the structure of ethical intentionality. This sublation occurs the moment an agent says, “Okay. I understand and know the situation. Now, what should I do?” Typically, an agent begins to ask questions of value, questions which, in Patrick H. Byrne’s words, intend “practical insights into possible courses of action.” The goal of questions for intelligence and questions for judgment is to grasp, respectively, understanding and a virtually unconditioned judgment of fact. Likewise, the goal of questions of value is to “grasp of virtually unconditioned value” until, ultimately, a judgment can be made about that value in a decision which implements the value in action. Instead of “ascending” into an “ethics of discernment,” however, Oedipus’ development remains arrested, in a static state of undistorted affectivity that makes moral conversion impossible. The play ends with Oedipus hovering in a liminal state, somewhere between Lonergan’s rational consciousness and rational self-consciousness. This liminal position of distorted affectivity lends credence to Marina McCoy’s claim that, “Sophocles does not reject the rational in favor of a tragic vision that is anti-rational or non-rational; rather, the rational itself includes an affective element.” In Chapter 2, I point out the various “interferences” in the dynamic, self-correcting sequence which I argue imbues Oedipus’ journey with its especially tragic and ironic dimension. I argue that the tragedy (and irony) of the play pivot on the “polymorphism” of Oedipus’ consciousness. A corollary to this argument is that we may understand some of the muddled thinking and the bitter intersubjective quarrels in the play – including but not limited to Oedipus v. Tiresias, Oedipus v. Creon and Oedipus v. Jocasta – through the prism of Lonergan’s discussion of “bias.” My discussion of bias naturally leads to an interpretation of the play that finds Sophocles indicting, not wisdom per se, as Nietzsche argued, but those who fail to understand what it means to correctly understand; those, in other words, who would deign to reduce understanding to a simple matter of “taking a look,” to use Lonergan’s phrase. I argue that the symbolism in the drama staunchly affirms Lonergan’s well-known claim that, “What is obvious in knowing is, indeed, looking. Compared to looking, insight is obscure, and the grasp of the unconditioned is doubly obscure. But empiricism amounts to the assumption that what is obvious in knowing is what knowing obviously is.” In Chapter 3, I enlarge the focus of my analysis from Oedipus’ single consciousness to the milieu in which that consciousness operates – Corinth, Thebes and, finally, Colonus. Viewed through a prism of Lonergan’s social theory, Thebes, and to a lesser extent Corinth, become exempla of “cities in decline,” symbolized generally by their hostility to questioning which, specifically, allows various biases to reign. I discuss the Greek concept of pollution, beginning with the familiar distinction between agos and miasma, and suggest that we may treat the idea of pollution in Oedipus Tyrannus as a metaphor for what Lonergan’s called the “long cycle of decline” and its root cause, “general bias,” the unprincipled privileging of the immediate and concrete over that which is non-present. The byproduct of this bias is “the social surd.” In an essay entitled, “The Absence of God in Modern Culture,” Lonergan notes, in cultures exists the “disastrous possibility of a conflict between human living as it can be lived and human living as a cultural superstructure dictates it should be lived.” I argue that there many junctures in the play in which the failure of insight and the triumph of oversight is compounded by if not caused by the dictates of Theban and Corinthian cultures, starting with Laius and Jocasta’s decision to murder their child, a choice which is then echoed by Polybus and Merope’s choice to suppress the truth of their son’s origin. I then point out that the most obvious operative bias here is group bias, symbolized by various characters’ commitment to violent patriarchy which neglects female voices of reason. I show, following McCoy and Christopher Long, that Colonus, courtesy of Theseus’ leadership, represents a possible antidote to this group bias through healing love. As Oedipus says of the space of Colonus in 1125, “In all my wanderings, this is the only place/Where I have found truth, honor and justice./I am well aware of how much I stand in your debt,/Without your help I would have nothing at all.” For Lonergan, if the mischief of bias is to be conquered, the ultimate ground for that conquering will come from a liberation outside the agent’s own native resources. Colonus gives us a glimpse of this third mode of self-transcendence, religious conversion, which, for Lonergan, is an unrestricted being in love with a “mysterious, uncomprehended God.” On the one hand, this viewpoint would seem to represent a juncture at which Lonergan’s thought simply does not and cannot apply to a classical text, such as Oedipus Tyrannus or Oedipus at Colonus. Lonergan’s notion of unrestricted being in love (with God) and his further distinctions of operative and cooperative grace would seem to be anachronistic. And yet, Lonergan claims that unrestricted being in love is “interpreted differently in the context of different religious traditions.” I argue that there is a sense in which Theseus’ almost otherworldly commitment to reverence (aidos) for the sacred space of Colonus, and his compassionate commitment to care for the stranger (xenia), more closely approximates or, at the very least, anticipates the almost supernatural dynamism of the authentic moral conversion Lonergan seems to have in mind. There are moments, in other words, in which Theseus relies on the dynamism of his own native intelligence and others in which something beyond him seems to be at work, as if a precursor to the supernatural moral disposition of the father in Luke’s “Parable of the Prodigal Son.” I conclude this chapter by noting that implicit in my argument is the premise that Oedipus Tyrannus cannot be read without adverting to Oedipus Colonus, without which the full sweep of the conquering of bias cannot be appreciated. From this premise I then deduce that the pessimistic Nietzschean reading of Oedipus Tyrannus, at the very least, requires more context. And while it is certainly possible to read Tyrannus separately from Colonus, insofar as they are not part of a traditional cycle, including Colonus in an analysis of Tyrannus discloses a further development in Sophocles’ thought that we may use to retroactively assess Tyrannus philosophically, especially vis-à-vis nihilism. Chapter 4 is devoted to a discussion of Lonergan’s metaphysics of human freedom and its relation to willingness, moral impotence and liberation. Here I apply Lonergan’s rich and complicated discussion of human freedom in Insight to offer a viewpoint that is contrary to deterministic readings of the play. In Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge, Charles Segal advises us that to offer any fresh approach to Oedipus Tyrannus one must “remove a few layers of misconception.” Segal’s first misconception is this: “This is not a play about free will versus determinism.” He adds that “the issues of destiny, predetermination, and foreknowledge are raised as problems, not as dogma.” I will suggest here that if this assessment is accurate, the unintended irony of the play is that it nevertheless affirms a principle (dogma?) in spite of itself: that human freedom is enlarged by human intelligence, insofar as intelligence specifies, via practical insights and practical judgments of facts and values, a range of choices for the will to select. It follows that ignorance, bias and moral impotence, in blocking or shrinking this range of choices, limit our effective freedom to the point at which we are incapable of fully actualizing our essential freedom. Here I recruit Lonergan’s provocative image of the “surrounding penumbra” to describe “moral impotence,” in which he says, “Further, these areas are not fixed; as he develops, the penumbra penetrates into the shadow and the luminous area into the penumbra while, inversely, moral decline is a contraction of the luminous area and of the penumbra.” This image is particularly apt in describing the ways in which Oedipus enlarges the “luminous area” when he is authentically questioning, only to watch it contract into darkness when he is not – an equation symbolized by the Sophoclean trope of blindness. Finally, in an “Epilogue,” I conclude with some observations about the way in which Sophocles is often presented in undergraduate philosophy classes. I concur with Yoram Hazony who writes, in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, “I do not believe the dichotomy between faith and reason is very helpful in understanding the diversity of human intellectual orientations.” Likewise, it is unclear to me as to whether couching Athens as somehow opposed to Jerusalem is good pedagogical practice. In a similar mode, equally unclear to me is whether couching Sophocles as somehow opposed to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is good practice. Yes, contradistinction has its pedagogical merits, but it can also wash away nuance. I then suggest, by way of a conclusion, that if we must have a dichotomy, a better alternative, even pedagogically speaking, may be to use Lonergan’s dichotomy of the friendly or unfriendly universe. For ultimately, we are faced with one existential question: is our universe a friendly one? In Method in Theology, Lonergan asks, poignantly: "Is moral enterprise consonant with this world?...is the universe on our side, or are we just gamblers and, if we are gamblers, are we not perhaps fools, individually struggling for authenticity and collectively endeavoring to snatch progress from the ever mounting welter of decline? The questions arise and, clearly, our attitudes and our resoluteness may be profoundly affected by the answers. Does there or does there not necessarily exists a transcendent, intelligent ground of the universe? Is that ground or are we the primary instance of moral consciousness? Are cosmogenesis, biological evolution, historical process basically cognate to us as moral beings or are they different and so alien to us?" The phrase “friendly universe” comes a bit later in the text, when Lonergan adds, “Faith places human efforts in a friendly universe; it reveals an ultimate significance in human achievement; it strengthens new undertakings with confidence” (117, my italics). Notice the connection Lonergan adduces between religious conversion, or the unrestricted being in love with God, as the ground of the friendly universe. And yet, as I mentioned earlier, this unrestricted being in love is, as Lonergan points out, “interpreted differently in the context of different religious traditions.” After all, Socrates was no Christian; but he did believe the universe was friendly. In this context, I argue that Sophocles ought to be aligned with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, not to mention most Biblical texts, against the truly opposed counter-position, “nihilism.” While it is certainly true that, in Oedipus, Sophocles heard that “eternal note of sadness on the Aegean,” as Matthew Arnold once wrote, Sophocles also seems to have heard in Colonus a note of compassion and wisdom and love and the hope for a construction of a community in which human striving is not in vain. As Oedipus tells his daughters, But there is one small word that can soothe – And that is ‘love.’ I loved you more than Anyone else could ever love, but now Your lives must go on without me. (1610-1619) / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

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The Western contemporary notion of the secular family seems to be supported by the following contradictory premises: on the one hand, the nuclear family is supposed to be based on love (between husband and wife; between parents and children) that is expected to last ‘till death do us part'. On the other hand, what ought to last – in the relation between a restricted set of love objects – is also known to be an elusive and uncontrollable affect(ion), that seems to arise 'out of nowhere', and to disappear as quickly. Further, the popular understanding of a loving relation goes hand in hand with a supporting injunction to possess an object of love, which finds its ideological support in the contemporary ethos of Capital's relations of production/reproduction, particularly in the notion of private property. Several consequences ensue from these contradictions. Firstly, love gets compromised by fixing it on an extremely restricted set of chosen members and becomes something one needs to 'work at' (in case it 'fails') instead of a spontaneously arising force. It eventually becomes a 'promise' that is meant always to fail; however, it generates a whole spectrum of industries that successfully cash in on the idea of love, by selling love in what looks to be an unlimited variety of commodity forms (products, service, affective services, etc.). Secondly, the notion of love that is meant to correspond to a possession of its object is a product as well as producer. This notion of... [to full text] / Šiuolaikinė dominuojanti Vakarų šeimos samprata yra grindžiama darant prieštaringas prielaidas. Iš vienos pusės, 'branduolinė šeima' turėtų būti paremta meile grįstais santykiais tarp žmonos ir vyro ir tarp vaikų ir tėvų - iš kurių yra tikimasi kad ji (meilė) turi tęstis iki 'kol mirtis išskirs'. Iš kitos pusės, ko yra reikalaujama ilgalaikio tęstinumo - tarp apribotų santykių su išskirtiniais (leistinais) meilės objektais – yra afekto, kuris pasižymi nenuspėjamumu, praeinamumu ir nepasidavimu racionaliai kontrolei. Ji (meilė) - kaip liaudies išmintis patvirtintų - kaip greitai ir nenuspėjamai 'ateina' taip pat greitai ir nenuspėjamai 'išeina'. Be to, populiarus meilės supratimas yra palaikomas papildoma reakcine geismo forma - pasisavinti, 'privatizuoti' meilės objektą, – atrandanti atgarsį ir palaikimą, šiuolaikinių kapitalistinių santykių, grindžiamų privačia nuosavybę, etose. Šie šeimos koncepto prieštaravimai turi bent kelias svarbias pasekmes. Visų pirmą, meilė yra sukompromituojama nurodant konkrečius ir simboliškai griežtai apribotus šeimos subjektus kuriuos yra leistina 'mylėti' ir tapatintis. Nepatenkinant šio meilės reikalavimo, 'meilės' pora yra skatinama 'dirbti' su savo santykiais , tikintis jog meilė gali būti produkuota, o ne kylanti iš spontaniško afekto. Galiausiai, meilės sąvoka tampa 'pažadu', kuris yra pasmerktas būti pastoviai neįgyvendinamas, bet kuris, tuo pačiu sukuria nišą visam spektrui kapitalistinių industrijų kurti pridėtinę vertę... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

La vision de la Grèce antique de Pasolini est une vision barbare parce que le cinéasterefuse toute idéalisation néoclassique. Une telle vision de l’antiquité était déjà répondue dans laculture européenne à travers les textes de Nietzsche. Pasolini est inspiré particulièrement pardeux disciplines auxquelles il se réfère souvent : l’anthropologie et la psychanalyse.A une thématique barbare correspond aussi, chez le cinéaste italien, un environnementbarbare, avec l’accord entre la forme de l’expression et la forme du contenu. Pasolini rejette lareconstitution archéologique : à la luminosité aveuglante du Maroc (où est tournée la partiemythique d’OEdipe roi), à l’architecture archaïque de pierre de la Cappadoce (la Colchide deMédée), aux remparts d’une ville syrienne d’Alep (Corinthe dans Médée), le cinéaste associe descostumes dans lesquels s’inscrivent de différentes cultures archaïques, et des musiquesprovenant pour la plupart des pays non-occidentaux (africaines, tibétaines, japonaises,roumaines).Avec la pratique de la contamination et du pastiche, Pasolini souhaite recréer le langageintemporel du mythe, le langage primaire dans lequel s’inscrit la civilisation paysanne. Cetterelation entre le mythe grec et le monde rural s’articule principalement autour de la notion decyclicité. / Pasolini’s vision of ancient Greece is barbaric because the filmmaker refuses any neoclassicalidealization. This vision of antiquity was already famous in European culture through the textsof Nietzsche. Pasolini is particularly inspired by two disciplines he often refers to : anthropologyand psychoanalysis.The barbarian theme is also linked to a barbaric environment, with agreement between the formof expression and form of content. Pasolini rejects archaeological reconstruction. He combinesblinding brightness of Morocco (were the mythical part of the Oedipus Rex is turned), archaicarchitecture in stone of Cappadocia (Colchis in Medea), and the ramparts of a Syrian city Aleppo(Corinth in Medea) with costumes from different archaic cultures and music mostly from non-Western countries (African, Tibetan, Japanese, Romanian).With the practice of contamination and pastiche, Pasolini wants to recreate the timelesslanguage of myth, the primary language of the peasant civilization. The relationship between theGreek myth and the rural world revolves mainly around the notion of cyclicity.

The thesis is an attempt to understand tragic guilt. My starting point is a comparison of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus with Shakespeare's Macbeth. The question of "guilt" is treated very differently in these two plays. Oedipus' guilt is a result of an action which is discovered, not chosen. He is the victim of a curse which lies upon his family and thus his own guilt is an ambiguous thing. He suffers against a background of a Law which demands punishment and a promise from a god that he shall be "saved". Oedipus at Colonus begins, as does Oedipus Rex, after the decisive act of murder and incest has been committed. But Macbeth begins before anything has been done; Macbeth is presented with a possibility and he chooses to believe that he can make it a reality. We are allowed to see the moment at which guilt appears in the individual. Macbeth becomes guilty before the very image of himself murdering Duncan. In Greek tragedy the guilt is often blood-guilt, a curse which descends from one member of a family to another and may devastate an entire house. But in Macbeth the guilt begins in the desires of one man. Macbeth is left with a personal despair which is different from the suffering that Oedipus undergoes. In the novels of Thomas Hardy, the perspective on guilt has shifted from the privacy that surrounds Macbeth at his death to the social world of nineteenth century England. Michael Henchard is perhaps closest to Macbeth in that he is destroyed more by the forces in his own personality than by the pressures of external society. But with Tess we have a heroine who is "pure", a woman who is defeated more as a result of the failings in a society than by any personal faults. There is little feeling of her having any particular "guilt". Jude Fawley's particular "tragedy" also must be seen in terms of the society that moves around him, its laws and conventions. The guilt is never entirely his own, nor is he simply an innocent victim. The presence of a definite society is hardly felt at all in the two novels of Conrad. Jim is a "romantic", a young man barely past adolescence who is obsessed with a concept of honour which he feels he has betrayed in a moment of cowardice. But he seems to become guilty in a deeper sense because of this obsession; he betrays others by choosing to live in an imaginary world of romantic achievement. Nostromo is also obsessed with a dream: to be a Man of the People. If Conrad's characters become guilty, it is because of their intense egoism, their inability to escape their passion for an idea. In Arthur Miller's The Crucible the guilt of an individual seems less important than the guilt present in a society. That guilt is an illusion based on a fear of not conforming to a rigorous law. We are left with the tragedy of a society which must find a victim to appease its own feeling of guilt. John Proctor is one of the chosen victims; a man who must die to save his integrity. But his death is the result of a web of guilt spread through an entire society. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Although Sophocles, according to tradition, died before the Oedipus Coloneus, his last work, was performed, there is no reason to believe that his intention in composing the play was fundamentally different from his life-long practice, that is to create a drama to be presented before a contemporary audience, and to win the prize in the contest for tragic poets at the Festival of Dionysus in Athens. In Part I of this study I have attempted to describe the manner in which Sophocles constructed his drama. I have divided the play into twenty manageable sections and devoted a chapter to each. Within each chapter each line, group of lines and, finally, each section, has been examined with a view to determining how it contributes to the process of changing the situation at the beginning of the drama, where Oedipus, a tired and wretched beggar, arrives in Colonus, to the situation at its end, when his life is over. At every stage the requirements of the dramatic circumstances, the demands of the plot, the constraints of the medium and the artistic effects for which the playwright aimed have been examined. The discussion takes the form of a commentary in that each point, regardless of its nature, has been dealt with as it arises in the text of the play. The reader will find himself confronted in turn/ as Sophocles must have been, with considerations of the reactions of the audience, theatrical effects, plot progression and so forth. Textual difficulties have been discussed only when their resolution is crucial for determining the contribution of a certain passage to the construction of the play. From this discussion a view of the play as an experience shared by the playwright and his audience emerges. The original audience was able to appreciate this play without the aid of a commentary. Therefore, no interpretation of a line, passage or scene which could not have been readily understood during performance can be correct. Further, the original audience was treated to aural and visual effects of which our text, with its complete lack of stage directions, bears only indirect traces. I have tried to determine what these effects may have been. It is hoped that the resulting observations will enable the reader better to understand the play, as the first spectators must have done - not primarily as an abstract treatise with a significant message for our times, but as a crowd-pleasing performance, complete in itself. In Part II of this study I have examined the question of the distribution of the roles in the Oedipus Coloneus among the limited number of actors which the playwright was allowed. I have first reviewed various suggestions for the distribution of the roles among three speaking actors. Every known scheme, however, has serious drawbacks which would have marred the quality of the performance of the play. I have therefore proceeded to examine various schemes wherein the roles are distributed among four actors. None of these, however, fully accounts for the complex system of entrances and exits and the occasional awkward silences. These phenomena can be explained only if Sophocles knew, when he wrote his play, how many actors were to be allocated to him and who they were to be. I have shown that this is a reasonable possibility. According to the distribution of the roles here proposed, Sophocles wrote his play to suit the specific talents of four speaking actors, and also employed a mute. The idiosyncracies of the Oedipus Coloneus are thus adequately explained. / Arts, Faculty of / Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of / Graduate

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1959 P57

M.A. / The purpose of this study is to look into Oedipal structures in the novels of Sibusiso Nyembezi. The notion of an Oedipal structure is derived from Sophocles' play entitled 'Oedipus the King'. In this play, Oedipus, a forsaken child, learns that he is a son of a Theban King. On the way to Thebes, he encounters and assassinates his father. Oedipus earns himself a title of a king after solving the riddle of the sphinx and marries his own mother ...

A Mother and Son Khilim records some of the images and myths from 22000 BCE to the present which locate the Oedipus myth in a history that makes sense of my emotional and intellectual responses to it. This chapter includes summarises of the story and its forbears which the reader will need to hold in mind through the later chapters of the thesis. A Sampler - Hypotheses, Questions, Themes introduces the main arguments as well as a summary of my conclusions from the inquiry, and some poetry and other writing which is intended to establish an atmosphere for the work. Oedipal Kings: Abandoned Boys and the Patriarchal Pattern provides an analysis of Sophocles' King Oedipus in support of my hypothesis that he is the mythic father of patriachal social structures and, therefore, that his life story might be viewed as a template for the formation of new patriachs. The chapter also includes a study of some contemporary eminent men in which I focus on the way early experiences of abandonment typically affect their adult behaviours. Silent Women presents Queen Jocasta as archetypal disempowered mother/ wife along with four contemporary women. The true self of each of the contemporary women was mute for many years as a result of negative or absent paternal experiences during adolescence. The Social Ecology of Mythic Thebes: A Study of Fate and Destiny in Patriarchal Culture extrapolates Jung's ideas about causality and teleology in individuals to the cultural setting of Oedipus's city state. The chapter concludes by contrasting the continuing disaster in Thebes with Oedipus's achievement of individuation. Resounding the silence is the title of the cycle of songs I wrote. This section includes the lyrics of all the songs. / Master of Science (Hons) (Social Ecology)